'8 Bit - A Byte of IIITB', student-run college magazine was lauched(January 26)

Kite-flying Festival(January 26)

From the Director's Desk:

As we said goodbye to the year 2014 and heralded the year 2015, there has been a number of activities at IIITB in the month of January 2015.

On January 5, Dr. Walden Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics and a semiconductor industry veteran, visited IIITB and announced a large software grant of over US$ 1 million.

Starting this month, we have Saturday Luncheon meetings with IIITB Alumni working in a specific company. We started with Cisco on January 11; GE Alumni were on campus on January 31; Intel & Fiberlink are planned for in February 2015.

Full-time placements for the Class of 2015 crossed 100 in January 2015.

Dr. Janaki Srinivasan (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A.) joined as IIITB Faculty on January 15; interestingly she is the first of our own Alumni to join the Faculty body!

On January 26, we had Republic Day celebrations followed by the launch of IIITB Magazine "8 Bits - A Byte of IIITB"!

Prof. Sadagopan, Director, and other faculty members attended a lecture by Turing Award winner Prof. Silvio Micali at Infosys on January 7.

Analytics Essentials 3 was completed on January 10 and Analytics Essentials 4 started on January 17. The programme was inaugurated with the lighting of the lamp and a speech by the Director.

Lohri is a popular Punjabi festival that is traditionally associated with the harvest season, so it is known as the harvest Festival also. Lohri was celebrated on campus on January 13. As per the tradition, a bonfire was lit, students gathered around the rising flames and threw til (sesame) and peanuts into the fire. The entire campus of IIITB danced to the tunes of Punjabi folk songs.

MyAutobiography, a unique social media was launched on January 21 in IIITB. The platform is intended to provide all the students and faculty at IIITB to start recording their own autobiography on an individual portal provided to each member. On the occasion, the founder of the initiative, Mr. Yogesh Kochhar, announced contests with prize money of INR 1 Lac and internships for two months for two deserving students in the upcoming summer break.For details: www.myautobiography.in

SPICMACAY Bangalore chapter organized a concert of Carnatic music, which was hosted on campus, by the eminent Carnatic singer Padma Bhushan Sangeetha Kalanidhi Shri T.V. Sankaranarayanan on January 23. It was a treat to listen to the artiste and the evening was a mesmerizing experience for all present there.

IIITB celebrated the 66th Republic Day on January 26. It included flag hoisting, an inspirational speech by the Director, a speech by Prateeksha (IMT2014040), a patriotic song by the student choir and singing of the National Anthem. The programme ended with distribution of sweets followed by kite flying.For video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg1hCwNRExU&list=UUtzrbJ_ndsynuc2X_W3C9zw

'8 Bit - A Byte of IIITB', is a student-run college magazine. With the frequency set to twice a semester, the first issue was launched on January 26 by the Director. The magazine captures the essence of campus life as everything is included from the student's perspective.

IIITB Incubation board meeting was held on January 28.

Publication

The paper titled “Graduate Course in Software Testing” by Profs. Meenakshi D'Souza and Sujit Kumar Chakrabarti,has been accepted, and will be presented at the International Workshop on Software Engineering Education on February 18 (Co-Located with ISEC 2015) Bangalore, India.

The paper titled "Wallah: Design and Evaluation of a Task-centric Mobile-based Crowdsourcing Platform" by Suhas Dev (MT2012142),Abhishek Kumar, Kuldeep Yadav, Shailesh Vaya, G. Michael Youngblood has been published in MOBIQUITOUS 14 Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services. This paper is a result of work that Suhas had done during his 6 months internship at Xerox Research Center India.
More details: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2693008http://www.eudl.eu/doi/10.4108/icst.mobiquitous.2014.258030

Prof. Sadagopan and few faculty members attended a High-Level Workshop on “Strategies for Engineering Education in India Towards 2025” on January 9.

Prof. Chandrashekar Ramanathan's nomination as ACM Senior Member has been accepted. The Senior Member Grade recognizes "those ACM members with at least 10 years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous Professional Membership who have demonstrated performance that sets them apart from their peers."

Prof. V. Sridhar and Prof. Manjunath D. (IIT Bombay) were the co-chairs for the Mobile India 2015 Conference held on January 9 at Bangalore.

The Director, faculty members and students attended Hari Sahasrabudhe lecture series on “Inflections in Computing”, initiated by Mr.s Narayana Murthy and conducted jointly with IIT Kanpur, for the January 2015 edition Prof. Steve Awodey, from CMU is speaking at Infosys and IIT Kanpur.

Prof. V. Sridhar presented the paper titled “Flexible Spectrum Management”, and also conducted the workshop at the SITM-TEC International Research Conference on January 16-17 in Pune, India.

Jaya Sreevalsan Nair and Beena Kumari were invited to attend and present at the DST National Airborne LiDAR Meeting at IIT Kanpur on January 19-20. They presented their work on "Remote Interactive Visualization of Parallel Implementation of Structural Feature Extraction of Three-dimensional Lidar Point Cloud".

The proposal “Cross-border Digital Flows and its Economic Impacts”, by Prof. V. Sridhar, has been selected for funding of about $9,600 (one of 10 selected) in the South Asia Network of Economic Research Institutes (SANEI) 16th Round Regional Research Competition.

Prof. Bidisha Chaudhuri presented her poster on "E-governance and social inclusion: The case of women entrepreneurs in Rajasthan" in the Human Computer Interaction track at the Xerox Research Center India's XRCI Open event on January 22-23.

There are new faces and roles on campus. Details of their joining:Prof. Janaki Srinivasan (Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, U.S.A.), Assistant Professor, January 15.

Students

Naveen Pai (MT2013087) was interviewed by Toptalent for sharing his placement experience. The site is one of the most popular placement preparations site in the country. The interview of Naveen Pai was in the context of his placement at Bloomreach and it covered his experience on preparation for the campus placement. This is the second time a IIITB student has been featured on their site. This initiative by Toptalent is intended to to help students prepare for job interviews and other placement activities.For details:http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/toptalent-interview-naveen-got-bloomreach/

Team Lunatics from IIITB participated in the Google Hackadroid Competition held during January 9-10 in Google Office, Bangalore. The theme of the Hackathon was to develop fitness related apps using Google's Fit API. Team members are Mayur Bhole (MT2014065) and Anand Tirthgirikar (MT2014126).
Their idea involved developing an Android application to train users for a particular sport, which involves building stamina, e.g. running, cycling, etc. The user initially selects the level of training (beginner/intermediate/advanced) and a target metric, corresponding to which a training plan is given to the user. The user's daily records (step count, distance etc.) are captured by wearable devices or sensors on the smartphone and are stored to a cloud using Google Fit API so that users can access that data from anywhere.

Team Engidroids participated in the Mahindra Comviva Hackathon competition held during January 22-23 in Mahindra Comviva, Bangalore.Team members developed an Android application for tracking worker performance in manufacturing companies. It automates the paper- based worker records by providing supervisors a facility to view their workers’ performance anytime and anywhere. ​Team members are Mayur Bhole (MT2014065), Nisarga Lolage (MT2014061) and Jigar Dave (MT2014027).

Sumant Kulkarni presented his poster entitled "Deep Matching: Explainable Semantic Matching Algorithms," co-authored with Prof. Srinath Srinivasa, at the XRCI Open event, organized by the Xerox Research Center India, on January 22-23.

DST-SERB has granted funding for Rajikha Raja (PH2012006) to attend the international conference SPIE Medical Imaging 2015 to be held in Orlando, Florida United States, during February 21-26 for presenting her paper "DTI - DKI fitting: a graphical toolbox for estimation and visualization of diffusion tensor and diffusion kurtosis imaging”.

January 15: 100 B.Sc. (IT) & B.Sc. (Mass Media) students from Sanpada Oriental Education Society affiliated to the University of Mumbai visited IIITB as part of their industrial visit to know more about the impact of IT to their career and prospective career paths in IT.